It’s Our Nature: Is the ruffed grouse, our state bird, imperiled?

The ruffed grouse has been our state bird since 1931. If current trends continue, could it disappear and will it need to be replaced?

My birding pals Dave, Rich and I keep a yearly bird list and a mild competition evolves to see who can record the most species in our county. I always lose. More troubling though, in four of the past five years I have been unable to find a grouse.

In my teens and 20s, I always kept a Saturday open for a grouse hunt in the “White Oaks” section of Carbon County. I remember one day I flushed 13 grouse. Where I hunt deer, I would almost always flush a grouse as I hiked to or from my deer stand. That was then. This past spring I finally did hear ONE drumming near the Penn Forest Reservoir. What has happened?

I’ll offer some of my rationale first. In the ’60s and early ’70s it was difficult to find a wild turkey. Our forests were dense with hemlocks and a thick understory. Forests were regularly timbered, and for years the trees competed for light and regrew into dense habitats. It was difficult to walk and navigate unless you found some heavily used deer trails to follow. Grouse thrive in this type of setting.

They feed on green briar berries, dogwood fruits, acorns, buds and, in warmer weather, insects. The hemlocks offered them dense cover to roost in overnight and to dart behind when evading a hunter’s shots. Today, in most areas, the hemlocks are dead or dying due to the woolly adelgid. Many of the oak trees have suffered due to the gypsy moth invasions, and that may have affected them too.

Today’s forests have matured and the trees’ dense crowns block most of the sunlight getting to the forest floor. This inhibits young saplings, witch hazel, dogwoods and green briars from growing. The forests look beautiful, almost parklike, but this is what wild turkeys thrive in, not our state bird. Today, you can see the wild turkeys almost everywhere, but not grouse.

If the loss of early successional forests wasn’t bad enough, the West Nile virus may now have seriously decimated the remaining grouse population. West Nile virus was first found in the U.S. in 1999. Our grouse populations crashed after 2003.

Other bird species such as the thrushes have been hard hit as well. Only 10 percent of infected grouse survive.

The ruffed grouse gets its name from the black feathers the male displays around his neck in the breeding season. He generally struts on a fallen tree trunk and “drums.”

The “drumming” is actually the sound his wings make as he rapidly beats them. It sounds like a distant engine trying to start. Thump … … … Thump … … … Thump … … … Thump, Thump, Thump, Thump, Thump, Thump. It starts slow and speeds to a very rapid crescendo.

They are precocial and lay 9 to 14 eggs in a leafy cup next to a tree trunk. The female will sit “tight” and only at the last second fly if you approach too close. The hen grouse has a similar routine as the killdeer when you get too near her newly hatched brood. One hen dragged her wing and was very vocal trying to draw me away from them. She got close enough to me that I touched her with the tip of my fly rod.

I may never have the opportunity to see that again. I hope the population rebounds.

Test your outdoor knowledge: After winter’s snows have melted, some homeowners find a zigzag pattern of chewed grass trails on top of the soil. What animal species is responsible? A. Meadow vole, B. eastern mole, C. short-tailed shrew, D. chipmunk

Answer to last week’s trivia: The black bear gives birth to her cubs while in her winter den and they are about a half pound at birth.

Contact Barry Reed at breed71@gmail.com.